Landmarked: land claims and restitution in South Africa, by Cherryl Walker, Athens, OH and Auckland Park, Ohio University Press and Jacana Media, 2008, xii + 292 pp., $26.95, ISBN 9780821418703
Walker's Landmarked is probably the best single-volume introduction to land restitution in South Africa. The book's great strength is the way it combines the emotional immediacy of attachment to land, detailed case studies, and national-level policy reflection in a single volume. This is possible because of the personal history and experience that Walker brings to the book, as the daughter of a white farmer in the Western Cape, a fieldworker with the land activist non-governmental organisation (NGO) the Association for Rural Advancement (AFRA), as a member of the first post-apartheid government's restitution team as Land Claims Commissioner for the then newly created province of KwaZulu-Natal, and as a scholar of South African social history.
The book is framed by an overall argument about the limits of the ‘restitution narrative’: a morally and politically charged account that tells of the dispossession of rural Africans by whites and which positions the return of land through restitution as a path to justice and healing. As Walker puts it, this is ‘a historical narrative of quintessentially rural dispossession and restitution which, while not broadly untrue, is insufficient as a basis for understanding today's developmental challenges’ or effectively addressing the range of claims encountered by the restitution program (p. 233). As a charter for land and agrarian reform, she argues, it narrowly focuses attention to the former ‘white’ countryside to the neglect of the African labour reserves, and underplays urban issues, both in terms of the significance of urban restitution claims, and the urbanisation of the African population. Restitution has also unfolded in a context of rapid social change in which the material value of land in an increasingly non-agrarian economy may not keep pace with its symbolic value, a context in which the ‘restitution narrative’ underestimates the contemporary environmental and political–economic challenges to making a living off the land. Finally, the narrative frames issues in a form too general to deal with the diversity of actual claims, which have pitted different groups of claimants against one another and raised difficult issues about the value of competing land uses (p. 233).
These issues are explored in depth in chapters on three land restitution claims that, in the process of claiming and in their ‘post-settlement’ struggles, illustrate the diversity of challenges and possibilities of restitution without sacrificing detail, and in which Walker was involved as Land Claims Commissioner for KwaZulu-Natal. The three case studies are aptly chosen: for newcomers to restitution in South Africa they will provide a useful overview of salient issues, while readers familiar with the context will find some unexpected variations on general themes here.
The first case, Cremin, represents a ‘black spot’, an area where amakholwa (the Zulu term for an elite class of mission-educated Christians) had purchased land under individual title prior to apartheid, and from which they were forcibly removed in the homeland era. The case illustrates persistent effects of rural differentiation and complex ways it has intersected with restitution, and emerges as successful more because of the ‘relative privilege and social cohesion of the claimants … than … state policies and bureaucratic performance’ (p. 28).
The second case focuses on the Eastern Shores of Lake St Lucia, one of the earliest claims involving a protected area; together with other similar early claims at Makuleke and Dwesa-Cwebe, it represents an early instance of the general approach – with some significant variations in particular contexts – for the resolution of land claims on protected areas in a way that maintains the conservation status of the land. Walker grapples here with the question of the public interest in conservation against owners’ rights to productive use of land. Restitution here has offered some financial and emotional benefits to the claimants, but has not in the end allowed them to reoccupy their land.
The third case, Durban's Cato Manor, exemplifies both the tensions between the restitution of land and alternative urban development strategies, and concerns over the restoration of land to the Indian landlords who spearheaded the claim. The Cato Manor Development Authority successfully lobbied for the inclusion of provisions in the Restitution Act (section 34) that would allow local governments to apply to the Land Claims Court to ‘rule out land restoration as a settlement option for restitution claimants in specific areas under their jurisdiction’ (p. 157). What ensued was a highly confrontational and expensive court and negotiation process that in the end did not compensate many of the former tenants of Cato Manor landlords, shift the apartheid-era ethnic divisions within the city, or result in much actual restoration of land (pp. 164–166).
No book could cover the full range of land restitution experiences in South Africa, and there are certainly aspects of the cases here that are closely tied to the context of KwaZulu-Natal. But taken together, the cases here, and later chapters on the difficulties of evaluating the restitution program, illustrate well the central tension between the nationally politically valuable narrative of dispossession and restitution and the complexities of particular restitution cases.
A chapter on Walker's own attachments to the farm of her childhood, together with a series of vignettes on individual claimants and the testimonies of others affected by forced removals and evictions, engages the challenging but vital issue of how to express an empathy across boundaries of class, culture and circumstance, and a sense of attachment to land that neither trivialises it nor appears presumptuous of a shared experience. While readers will undoubtedly have different responses to these sections, I was impressed that a single text could move coherently and successfully between detailed discussions of national evaluation statistics and their limitations on one hand, to the emotional intimacy of reflections on the author's privilege and ties to land on the other.
Because it works on so many different levels, the book is particularly well suited for teaching. Several years ago when I was designing a syllabus for an undergraduate class on the political economy of southern Africa, I could not find a suitable monograph on land reform. The next time I offer the course, Walker's book will be on my syllabus. Finally, the publishers are to be commended for allowing the book to include more than 50 black and white photographs (another asset for the classroom), taken by the author and others, ranging from the ruined homes of people removed under apartheid to the ceremonies accompanying the settlement of land claims.